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Thoreau on education
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Today education has an endless amount of definitions which are correct in certain aspects of society, but most leave out the one part of education that is truly vital. That is the concept of real life experiences. The debate on what it means to be educated has been going on for centuries, yet the answer isn’t esoteric at all! The scintillating Henry David Thoreau amazed scholars of his philosophy that one simply doesn’t just go to school to be educated, but one has to experience the world in order to be prepared for it. He lived in a small house on Walden Pond and lived off of the land. He quoted “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to …show more content…
Imagine if students were taught only formal education in school? In Spayde’s article, Learning in the Key of Life, he is saying that people will be anti-social in life if they are only taught formal education. Spayde uses Nietzsche, a German philosopher, who says that “Metaphysics are in the street”. According to Nietzsche, metaphysics mean “those final problems of the human condition: death, loneliness, the meaning of existence, the desire for power, hope, and despair.” Nietzsche proves that you can only learn the meaning of life through personal experiences and repertoire. Jon Spayde uses Nietzsche to prove that one simply can’t learn metaphysics in the classroom. This infers that if one goes to private school all their life, they will become anti-social and not get along in the real world. Spayde proves his argument that you need both personal experiences and formal education “to be educated” by taking one of the factors out which then shows that one wouldn’t fit into
Ernest Gaines was born during the middle of the Great Depression on January 15, 1933. He was the oldest of twelve children. At the age of nine Gaines worked as an errand boy on the River Lake Plantation, the same plantation his book A Lesson Before Dying was set in. Gaines was raised by his Aunt Augusteen Jefferson, much like Grant, the protagonist in the novel, was raised by his Aunt Tante Lou. At the age of fifteen Gaines rejoined his immediate family in Vallejo, California because there were no high schools for him to attend in Louisiana. Gaines also wanted to enter a public library which was illegal for people of color to use. At this time in U.S. History, books about colored people were scarce and so Gaines decided to try and write his own novel. The desire to write led him to San Francisco State and Stanford University where he took creative writing courses. His first book, Catherine Carmier, was published in 1964. He finished his most famous novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, in 1971. The success of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman prompted Gaines to write more about the black communities of southern Louisiana. The most successful book dealing with the colored people of southern Louisiana, A Lesson Before Dying, was penned in 1993 (“About Ernest Gaines” 1).
The author of the article “A Call to Service in Ernest Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying” is Beatrice McKinsey. In McKinsey’s introduction, she stated her thesis statement: “whatever one’s social class, race, or education maybe, we have a purpose or a call to service. Ernest Gaines uses the main characters, Grant and Jefferson, to demonstrate how men can achieve manliness through service” (McKinsey 77). By stating this thesis statement, McKinsey shows her audience that she will be discussing the main characters, as well as their journey to becoming manly. Overall, this is seen as the purpose for her article.
“How do people come up with a date and time to take life from another man? Who made them God?” – Grant (Page 157)
Because the education system does not relate classwork or homework to the lives of students, they do not see how writing essays or solving math problems can help them in everyday life. “By the time Roadville children reach high school they write off school as having nothing to do with what they want in life, and they fear that school success will threaten their social relations with people whose company they value. This is a familiar refrain for working class children” (Attitude 119). As students begin to realize how low their potential is within school, they chose to cut school out of their life and start working. These students do not understand how they can benefit from what they are learning. “One woman talks of the importance of a ‘fitting education’ for her three children so they can ‘do better’, but looks on equanimity as her sixteen-year-old son quits school, goes to work in a garage, and plans to marry his fifteen-year-old girlfriend ‘soon’” (Attitude 118). Students are settling for less than what they can actually achieve to have, just because they see no purpose of being in school, and believe they can do better without the help of the education system. Even parents are not actually supporting and encouraging their child to stay in school. “Although Roadville parents talk about the value of school, they often act as if they don’t believe it”
Real-life heroes these days are firemen, police officers, emergency room medics. However, there are many stories of everyday people who end up hailed as heroes. In the novel A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines, the main characters do not follow any of the typical ‘hero’ professions. In a small American community, Jefferson, a young black man, has just been sentenced to death for a crime he never committed by an all-white jury. His former schoolteacher Grant Wiggins is forced to visit him by his aunt Tante Lou, who hopes that Grant can teach Jefferson some dignity before he faces the electric chair. Through the actions of Jefferson and Grant we can determine whether or not they are heroes to the African-American community which, after years of suppression and apartheid, is so in need of strong idols to look up to.
Education is in itself a concept, which has changed over the millennia, can mean different things and has had differing purposes according to time and culture. Education may take place anywhere, is not constrained by bricks and mortar, delivery mechanisms or legislative requirements. Carr (2003. p19) even states, “education does not necessarily involve teaching”. Education, by one definition, is the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life (education, n.d.).
Smith, M. K. (1997, 2004). Carl Rogers and Informal Education. In The Encyclopedia of Informal Education. Retrieved from http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-rogers.htm
The article states, “Education is about finding out what form of work for you is close to being play- work you do so easily that it restores you as you go” (8). Edmundson believes education should help someone find exactly what he or she wants to do with their life. Education should not limit a student of finding who they are or how they can help our world, just because another student feels uncomfortable with the subject. A higher education should be for learning about the world we live in, yet students demand shelter and run from the truth. Edmundson explained in his article, “The idea that the courses you take should be the primary objective of going to college is tacitly considered absurd” (3). In other words: partying, clubs, and friends are found to be more important than classes while at school. Anyone who thinks the courses taken are more important than having a good time are considered out of the ordinary. Edmundson wants to be influenced, taught new things, and “thrown off [his] course and onto another, better way” (6) while reading. Many twenty first century students would find this absurd. Any Twenty First century student who wants to learn the truth will have to fight for edification. They will have to be assertive and aggressive in order to get a true education. If they do not, then they will not get the opportunity to obtain an education that could help not only their future, but the future of others. Learning about the problems our world faces would help students fix the problems, instead of turning heads away from the issues at hand. Lives can be saved if students just listen, learn and
The method in which an individual chooses to become educated, is as unique as the human individual is in itself. Education should not just be based on the traditional Books of the canon including: Dante, Shakespeare, Aristotle, Sophocles, Locke, Dickens and Faulkner, but it should strive towards making an equally balanced student, which it doesnt seem to be doing. Spayde argues in the favor of an in-the-streets education. Granted, an in-the-streets education cant take the place of a formal education, I feel strongly, that having and knowing street smarts can get you far in the 21st. Century.
He argues that students “want to be doing something real” (Gatto 23). Also, he explains that they produce a manageable working class and “mindless consumers” (27-28). His point is that students want to learn something new that helps them in their life better than actual books from school which don’t apply their interests and their experience (23). He recommends home-schooling as an option to schools (24). Gatto claims that contemporary schools “adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects.... ...
Education means a variety of things to any individual because it is the route to fulfilling dreams that one would not have otherwise been able to believe was possible. Just as food provides nourishment to the stomach, happiness satisfaction to the soul, education is the dietary supplement to the brain. Education endows one with the strength and motivation to have a dream, as a consequence one is able to lead a life filled with happiness. One is able to have contentment because with the attainment of an educated mind they are cognizant that they can achieve all of what they have ever imagined. As children we are taught to dream what we want to become and as an adolescent, we are able to live to become just as what we have imagined. The very essence of what we seek to become is educated in a sense because we can only become a step closer to making our reality come into existence without beginning with education.
This social institution strived on being compelling, considerate, and uncompromising, which they stayed consistent to most of the time. Critical thinking stayed consistently taught throughout my English and religion classes. But my schooling also taught me that my opinion is just as important as anyone else’s, which leads to Rouner’s opinions of people believe that their opinions can not be wrong (2015, 1). Many rewarding aspects came from being enrolled in a private school that I know many of my friends in public schools did not receive the opportunities to do. For example, having an optional class specifically dedicated to applying to different colleges, a class that taught you how to build a résumé, and many others. These opportunities lead others in public school to assume that myself and the other students at my high school were rich, snotty kids because we were at a private school. They assumed that we are all rich and thought we were better then them, which is far from the truth. These assumptions made
What kind of experience can be called an education? Is it the practice of stuffing knowledge or information into the brains of students? Or is it the activity in which the master shows their apprentices the proper skills to make delicate works? People are prone to accumulate possessions. For some, they stock up substantial materials. But others prefer to possess knowledge. There were many sophists who proclaimed themselves to be omniscient and gave instructions to anyone who sought for their help. As we have noticed, “certain professors of education must be wrong when they say that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes” (Plato 4). Education can only be done when the restrictions are removed and the latent potentials of students are provoked. In the soul of everyone there already exists the power and capacity of learning. Education is to activate those powers and capacities so as to complete the ascent from becoming into being.
There is no one single definition for what education really is. Experts and scholars from the beginning have viewed and commented about education in different ways. The definition mostly agreed upon was that education is an acquisition or passing of skills, behavior or knowledge from an institution to another. This institution can either be a person, a school, a family or even the society. If we go in the ancient meaning and the ideology of education, it means to lead out of ignorance. In other words, education or knowledge in this sense was light and education brought the person out of the dark. The purpose and ideology of education is therefore to bring out the potential of a person and pass on knowledge
Education is a very important aspect of the lives of all people all over the world. What we learn, not just in the classroom, shapes who we are. We take our education everywhere we go. We use it when talking to our buddies about sports or music, we use it while solving a math problem, we use our education while debating with our family whether or not we should watch TV or go to the movies. Our education is the foundation of who we are, since every decision we make and every thought we think is dependent on what we know. Imagine how different the world would be if everyone craved learning to such a degree that at lunch tables all over the world the topic of conversation isn't who likes who, or how drunk someone got over the weekend, but it would be what books were read over the weekend, and what new ideas were thought of. This crave for learning would be an ideal but still suggests need for improvement with the current educational system. It seems that the problem with education is that somewhere along the lines the human race forgot (assuming they, at one point, understood how valuable information is) that learning is not just a mandatory process, but also an opportunity to transcend and open the gateway to a better understanding.